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Transcendent Gray Lady

How far are we away from a completely vindictive, murderous madness like The Terror of revolutionary France?

I know, almost no one is talking of guillotines.

But a lot of people seem determined to destroy others’ lives publicly. We are all too familiar with Twitterstorms where worked-up outrage forces someone out of a job or a deal— usually for making jokes.

But it’s not just jokes. Not long ago an actor got in trouble for Tweeting that commentator and Daily Wire host Ben Shapiro seems a nice, honest person on the right that a leftist might listen to. The actor was forced to recant, and then Shapiro himself publicly recanted from some past putatively “dumb” things he “did” or “said.” Or something.

Since we’re talking about Mr. Shapiro, his commentary on the Sarah Jeong case is not irrelevant. The New York Times hired Ms. Jeong despite her past racist tweets.

Well, racist-against-whites.

“By the rules of the left,” says Shapiro, “this person should now be excised from polite society.”

But the Times is keeping her.

Shapiro finds this “indicative” of more than just the Times. The left at large seems OK with anti-white racism but not anti-any-other-race.

It’s indicative of a lot more, though, not just racism and anti-racism and anti-anti-racism.

Outrage and the Twittermob may be fun. But it’s time to stop.

Is the Times leading the way?

Only when the decrepit old rag defends someone not on its own ideological side. Transcending partisan mob mania means first transcending partisanship.

While the Left isn’t talking about bringing out the guillotines–Robespierre had them mounted on the backs of wagons so he could purify the people in the countryside–they still glorify Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution with its throngs of Red Guards surging through the streets waving their little red books of Mao’s sayings and stamping out anything they saw as “counterrevolutionary”.